"What right has a dilettante like you to sit in judgment?" he demanded, the other's barb rankling none the less that he had invited it. "You have no notion of just political expediency; no notion even of politics with which you meddle. Politics isn't book knowledge; it's flesh and blood fact. Party fealty means nothing to you. You've not voted a straight ticket twice in your life." "I know where that shoe pinches," retorted Graves. "You mean I've consistently neglected to vote for you. Somehow I never could swallow your assumption of divine right to hold office all the time." Shelby's fingers knotted round his whip-handle. "I'd like to trounce you," he menaced. "It's a hiding you need." "For presuming to run against you? Let me make it plain that I'm not to be intimidated by you or any of your creatures." "I'd like to trounce you," repeated Shelby, hoarsely, beside himself with the gadfly inquisition of the past few days. "I'm sick of your pharisaical ways. I bottom your lofty motives well enough. Jealousy goaded you into politics. You're a reformer because the heiress wanted none of you. If Ruth Temple--" Graves wrenched the whip from Shelby's grasp, and struck with all his might. The warded blow spent itself on the pommel of the saddle. "Stung, eh?" Shelby leaped from his stirrups and closed with him. The cob took fright at the reeling men and pounded off up the tow-path toward the town. Then another horse loomed of a sudden from out the dusk, and Ruth herself rode straight upon them, enforcing a separation. "How dare you drag my name into a low political quarrel--either of you?" No one answered her. "Give _me_ the whip." Shelby, who had regained it, obeyed without a word. Ruth flung it far into the canal. "Now if you will be brutes, use brutes' weapons." Wherewith she turned an indignant back and galloped an exit from the scene as spirited as her entrance. "You knew she was there," accused Graves. "I left her in the road, damn you. I couldn't know she had seen." Standing on the dock's sheer edge, they glowered into one another's eyes through the fading twilight, the great steam cranes behind flinging out giant arms over the stone heaps, the black water below glancing with fitful gleams of steel and copper from the sunset's last saffron afterglow. The yellow headlight of a low-lying grain boat stole nearer, unheeded till the straining mules toiled by. "I don't know what keeps me from--" Shelby's lips were tardy of framing what his heart lusted. "Fear, perhaps." "If you think that, then--" A rain of oaths from the driver warned them too late of the trailing tow-line. They tripped together, and in an embrace of self-preservation together fell into the cool still waters which ever draw unruffled, though their banks smoulder with passion and political intrigue from the Niagara to the Hudson.